Paul McAuley: Residuals

“Even from where I was, I could smell the stink, and Nyquist started to throw up. The second critter was almost on Mitchell when I fired again, the hot casing stinging my cheek as I worked the bolt, and fired, and fired, and kept shooting as Mitchell threw himself down in a tangle of wire while the thing went scooting off back toward the ship. My hands shaking so bad I sliced my hand bad when I trimmed the wires back to bare copper. Mitchell snatched them from me and touched them to the terminals of the truck’s battery.

“We didn’t have more than a dozen sticks of low-grade dynamite for getting out tree stumps, and Mitchell hadn’t had time to place them carefully when those things came scooting out like hornets out of a bottle. And Mitchell hadn’t even wanted to do it, saying that the ship must be fireproofed, like the Apollo module, or it wouldn’t have survived atmospheric entry. But it was our last best hope, and when the sticks blew, the ship went up like a huge magnesium flare. I put my hands over my eyes, and saw the bones of my hands against the light. The burst was etched into my eyeballs for months. It hardly left any debris, just evaporated into burning light, blasting the rock beneath to black crystal. You can still see the glassy splash where it stood if you can get the security clearance. There was a scream like a dying beast, but it was all over quickly. When we stopped blinking and the echo was dead, there was almost nothing where the ship had been. They were gone.”

Is that an ending? If it is, what has the rest of my life been? An epilogue, like on some Quinn Martin series episode, with William Conrad reporting that I am still at large, still running off my mouth, still living it down?

Or has it just been an interlude before the sequel?

I wake up the next morning with the shakes. There’s not even fumes in the tequila bottle I clutched to my chest all night, and nothing but warm cans of Dr Pepper in the motel vending machine, so I drive the mile into town and buy a twelve pack of Bud, giving thanks to California’s liberal liquor-license laws. I’m coming out of the 7 Eleven when two men in sunglasses fall in step with me on either side, and I don’t need to see their badges to know what they are.

They make me leave my beer in the car and take me across the dusty highway to the town’s diner, an Airstream trailer with a tattered awning shading one side. The older guy orders coffee and pancakes, and grins across the table while his partner crowds me on the bench. I can’t help looking through the greasy window at my car, where the beer is heating up on the front seat, and the older guy’s grin gets wider. He gets out a hip flask and pours a shot into my coffee, and I can’t help myself and guzzle it down, scalding coffee running down my chin.

“Jesus,” the young guy, Duane Bissette, says, disgusted. He’s the local field agent, blond hair slicked back from his rawboned face. He hasn’t taken off his mirrorshades, and a shoulder harness makes a bulge under his tailored suit jacket.

“Judge not,” the other guy says, and pours me another shot, twinkling affably. He has curly white hair and a comfortable gut, like Santa Claus’s younger brother. He’s hung his seersucker jacket on the back of his chair. There are half-moon sweat stains under his arms, and sweat beads under his hairline. “Ray’s living out his past, and he’s having a hard time with it. Am I right, or am I right?”

I ignore the rye whiskey in the coffee mug. I say, “If you want to talk to me, talk to my agent first. Murray Weiss, he’s in the Manhattan Directory.”

“But you’re one of us,” the older guy says, widening his eyes in mock innocence. “You got your badge, when? ’77? ’78?”

It was 1976 and I’m sure he damn well knows it, done right out on the White House lawn, with a silver band playing and the Stars and Stripes snapping in the breeze under a hot white sky. The Congressional Medal of Honor for me and Nyquist, and honorary membership in the FBI. I’d asked for that because if it was good enough for Elvis, it was good enough for me. It was the last time I saw Nyquist, and even then he was ignoring me with the same intensity with which I’m right now ignoring that rye.

I say, “Your young friend here was polite enough to show me his badge. I don’t believe I know you.”

“Oh, we met, very briefly. I was part of the team that helped clean up.” He smiles and holds out his hand over the coffee mugs and plates of pancakes, then shrugs. “Guerdon Winter. I’ll never forget that first sight of the crater, and the carcass you had.”

“You were all wearing those spacesuits and helmets. ’Scuse me for not recognizing you.”

The FBI agents looked more like space aliens than the things we killed. They cleared out everything, from the scanty remains of the mothership to my collection of tattered paperbacks. I still have the receipts. They took me and Nyquist and Mitchell and put us in isolation chambers somewhere in New Mexico and put us through thirty days of interrogation and medical tests. They took Susan’s body and we never saw it again. I think of the C-130 crash, and I say, “You should have taken more care of what you appropriated, Agent Winter.”

Guerdon Winter takes a bite of pancake.

“We could have had that alien carcass stuffed and mounted and put on display in the Smithsonian, and in five years it would have become one more exhibit worth maybe ten seconds’ gawping. The public doesn’t need any help in getting distracted, and everything gets old fast. You know better than me how quickly they forget. You’re the one in showbiz. But we haven’t forgotten, Ray.”

“You want me to find out what Mitchell is doing.”

“Mitchell phoned you from a pay phone right here in town ten days ago, and you wrote him at the box number he gave you, and then you came down here. You saw him last night.”

Duane Bissette stirs and says, “He’s been holed up for two years now. He’s been carrying out illegal experiments.”

“If you were following me you could have arrested him last night.”

Guerdon Winter looks at Duane Bissette, then looks at me. He says, “We could arrest him each time he comes into town for supplies, but that wouldn’t help us get into his place, and we know enough about his interrogation profile to know he wouldn’t give it up to us. But he wants to talk to you, Ray. We just want to know what it is he’s doing out there.”

“He believes you have the map,” Duane Bissette says.

I remember the scrap of paper Mitchell gave me last night and say, “You want the map?”

“It isn’t important,” Guerdon Winter says quickly. “What’s important is that you’re here, Ray.”

I look out at my rental car again, still thinking about the beer getting warm. Just beyond it, a couple of Mexicans in wide-brimmed straw hats are offloading watermelons from a dusty Toyota pickup. One is wearing a very white T-shirt with the Green Lantern symbol. They could be agents, too; so could the old galoot at the motel.

I know Duane Bissette was in my motel room last night; I know he took Mitchell’s map and photocopied it and put it back. The thing is, it doesn’t seem like betrayal. It stirs something inside me, not like the old excitement of those two crystal-clear days when everything we did was a heroic gesture, nothing like so strong or vivid, but alive all the same. Like waking up to a perfect summer’s day after a long uneasy sleep full of nightmares.

I push the coffee away from me and say, “What kind of illegal experiments?”

If Mitchell hadn’t been a government employee, if they hadn’t ridiculed and debunked his theories, and spirited him off to the ass end of nowhere—no Congressional Medal ceremony for him, he got his by registered mail—if they hadn’t stolen the discovery of Mitchellite from him, then maybe he wouldn’t have ended up madder than a dancing chicken on a hot plate at the state fair. Maybe he wouldn’t have taken it into his head to try what he did. Or maybe he would have done it anyway. Like me, he was living in After, with those two bright days receding like a train. Like me, he wanted them back. Unlike me, he thought he had a way to do it.